How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though?
Users were outraged, but Reddit mostly won.
How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
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I have nothing to back this up and I haven't spent any significant amount of time browsing Reddit since the end of June. Yesterday, a search result took me to a section of Reddit and eyebrowsed through a bit. I feel like the people that left were the people that contributed and a lot of the remaining traffic is the people that just browse. Social media and the internet are not like real world businesses that just tank. Online social media is made up of the people who view it and the people who contribute to it. Facebook became boomers, memes that aren't as clever as people who post them think they are, You're great and posting pictures of a family reunion you didn't know existed, and a substitute for craigslist. It didn't used to be that way, but I think overall they would say their numbers are solid. Social media evolves, and Reddit is evolving in a direction, that a core group of users who I speculate were some of the more useful contributors, don't want to participate in. We're not going to wake up tomorrow and find Reddit gone. But will it ever truly be the front page of the internet again? Will it ever be where I'm glad my search took me for a specific tech problem? Will information that used to be on individual bulletin boards scattered throughout the net which had centralized on Reddit remain on Reddit? Reddit will probably cash out in some way and we'll be left with the Facebook equivalent of Reddit. If that's something that quality contributors don't want to participate in, then it will be even more akin to Facebook. So is it going to go away? Probably not. Could you argue that it's basically already gone? I would say it's at least headed that way.
On some of the subs that I still frequent, the content has swiftly deteriorated, and it's not just due to the still on-going protests anymore. I'm subscribed to something like 50 subs or so, and it's always a handful of these that show up on my subscribed feed. If I want to find the other subs (some of which I don't fully recall why I subbed to them) I have to browse down past a lot of crap content, or look at my list and click them individually. In short, the experience has been awful, not to mention that I no longer browse it on my phone when bored.
Reddit is still there as a resource, mostly for Google searches that take me there, but otherwise it feels "dead" to me, in ruins. It will not go away, like you said, it'll definitely stick around but I think people will gradually move away to other platforms and its content will evolve to something that won't be relevant to us one day.
My personal predictions:
Reddit will continue to exist, but become an increasingly zombified dumping ground for screenshots from other platforms, videos of people being injured/humiliated in public, and lowest-common-denominator "discussion" of culture war topics. It may also to continue supporting small niche communities like r/HVACadvice where you can get a quick answer about something specific from a domain expert, but will largely just become a firehose of diarrhea.
Large Lemmy instances like lemmy.world will pick up the slack for the mostly good-natured people turned off by the advertising and shitshow at reddit and other corpo social medias. It'll be better than current reddit, but increasingly enlightenened centrist, and importing braindead redditisms (shit like "and my axe" etc.)
Smaller Lemmy instances that care more about the kindness and quality of discussion will pour more grassroots efforts into strict moderation, and defederating from mainstream instances. They will tradeoff a wider userbase for a more kind and nurturing atmosphere.